Marty Baron, the legendary former editor of The Washington Post, was among seven angel investors who joined a $30 million Series A funding round for Column, a public benefit company seeking to streamline the way public notices are published in newspapers.
Other individual investors include Reuters News executive Paul Bascobert, News Media Alliance CEO David Chavern, Craig Forman of NextNews Ventures, former Stripe executive Claire Hughes Johnson, equity management firm Carta’s Henry Ward and former Obama administration official Nick Sinai.
New York-based Lux Capital led the round for the Miami-based Column, while Amity Ventures and Govtech fund made follow-on investments. Column has so far raised $33.3 million.
Founded in 2019 by CEO Jake Seaton, Column develops software to streamline placement of public notices — such as law- or rule-making proposals and even liquor licenses—in newspapers across the United States, and in the United Kingdom and Canada. With the new funding, it plans to address the broader public information systems market.
“Column is on a mission to make public information systems more valuable, beginning with public notice,” said Seaton, whose family has run The Manhattan Mercury daily in Kansas for decades.
Eyeing Other Markets
Column provides its software for free to newspaper publishers and charges a processing fee on top of the transaction paid by governments, law firms and businesses that are placing public notices. Today, it has ties with newspapers in all 50 US states, and transacts one public notice every minute, according to Axios.
The startup’s software is believed to have helped many newspapers cut by half the costs of managing public notices. Column’s API — or application programming interface — that enables websites and apps to use its software is in private use in 18 states. It expects to release a public API for broader use by journalists and others monitoring public notices.
Seaton said Column would use the new capital to expand to digitize other public information systems, such as project proposal notices and property auctions. Column also plans to serve multilingual newspapers by improving machine translation.
Harvard Dropout, Google Engineer
Jake Seaton famously claims to have been a paper boy for nearly four years, delivering “the news on foot to folks” around his native Manhattan, Kan. Later in life, he dropped out of Harvard to help start Quorum, a public affairs software platform in 2015. The platform aggregates government datasets and is used by thousands of public affairs professionals around the world to track information, and to engage with lawmakers and other public officials.
Having established Quorum, Seaton went back to Harvard and finished his bachelors degree in computer science and journalism in 2018. For a brief four months, he worked for Google Cloud before serving as an angel investor and mentor, a role he continues to play. He started Column in 2019.
Lux Raised over $1 Billion in 2021
Founded in 2000 by Josh Wolfe and Peter Hebert, who both serve as co-managing partners, Lux Capital invests in emerging science and technology ventures, with “long-term bets on contrarians and outsiders.”
Commercial Real Estate
MacKenzie Companies
Advertising / Media / Communications / Public Relations
Nevins & Associates
Financial Services / Investment Firms
Chesapeake Corporate Advisors
Commercial Real Estate
Monday Properties
Venture Capital
Blue Delta Capital Partners
Internet / Technology
Foxtrot Media
Last year, Lux raised two funds totaling $1.475 billion. Lux’s other recent portfolio investments include GandeevaTherapeutics, Vosbor, Zededa and Rivet. Since its inception, the firm has invested in over 400 companies and made nearly 100 exits.
“We’re really excited about how they’re solving a unique problem,” said Shahin Farshchi, a partner who led Lux’s investment in Column. He will join the board of Column.
Farshchi previously cofounded Vista Integrated Systems on the back of a neural interface technology he developed during his PhD at UCLA. Vista uses the interface to build wireless vital sign monitors. He also developed hybrid electric vehicles for GM and worked as a software developer in several Silicon Valley startups before joining Lux.
